Employers still haven't learned their lesson

Jane Smith was an office cleaner for the council. For 12 years she vacuumed, polished and emptied bins. With no qualifications, she had little chance of a better job. Now she is a cleaning supervisor. She looks after the other cleaning staff and has to report to the area coordinator, a role that involves writing reports and using computers, things she always felt were beyond her.

The council had never bothered to offer Jane any training. What changed her life was a Unison poster. It offered members the chance to try some taster IT courses, one hour a week, over 10 weeks. The union had negotiated for the council to pay course fees. Jane signed up and never looked back.

Last year, more than 60,000 working people signed up for courses, brokered through their union. The number is growing every year and it's a success story that goes largely unnoticed.

Learning improves people's prospects, helps them get promotion or move to a better job, and can transform their private lives. Having an improved grasp of numbers or being able to read better makes understanding bills and bank statements much easier. Learning at work has allowed parents to help their children with their homework and read to them at bedtime for the first time.

Surveys of union members regularly show that they want unions to offer wide-ranging learning opportunities. Unskilled and semi-skilled workers want to improve their basic and intermediate skills, while more skilled and qualified workers, such as managers, teachers and specialists, are keen on ongoing professional development.

One reason unions are doing this is because employers aren't. Despite claims from UK business that it invests heavily in staff training, managers usually get the lion's share of the training budget. Someone with no qualifications is five times less likely to receive training than someone with a degree, which leaves cleaners like Jane with nothing until the union takes up the cudgels on their behalf.

It's these inequalities in training provision that make the unions' role so important. Legislation has helped. Union learning representatives are specially trained members who help colleagues access training opportunities at work and have the right to paid time off to advise on courses. There are almost 12,000 learning reps in England and the number is projected to grow to 22,000 by 2010. By then it is estimated they will be signing up around 250,000 new learners a year.

When a Newcastle bricklayer finally admitted, after 12 years, that he could not read it was to his learning rep, not his managers. Unions are trusted, they will fight for the right to time off, understand the problems of returning to learning after years away from school, and stand up for what workers want to learn. There are too many poor employers who take only a narrow, short-term view of the training their workers need.

The next step for the TUC and its affiliated unions is a union academy, to do for workplace learning what the Open University did for higher education.

Modern unions do not see all this as "fluffy stuff", or a diversion from militancy on to the more consensual terrain of learning. They recognise that their younger, newer union members - often women, black or migrant workers - know that gaining skills is crucial to improving their life chances. Bargaining for training opportunities is part and parcel of trade unionism.